In 2014 the police strategy that has kept the city safe for 20 years is probably going to be abandoned. So here’s a question for the mayoral candidates: What will replace it?
Almost all the candidates have already promised to either abolish or severely curtail measures such as stop and frisk. Meanwhile, the federal Justice Department has indicated that it favors a judicially imposed monitor to enforce restrictions on the police, and the City Council has enacted an ordinance providing for an inspector general to oversee the police commissioner.
The final blow came when the council approved a measure to let lawfully arrested individuals ask the courts to rule that they were illegally profiled and to impose sanctions on the police department (and, in some readings of the bill, on the arresting officer, too).
If this indeed becomes law despite Mayor Bloomberg’s vetoes yesterday, a police officer’s only safe way to make a collar will be to wait until the suspect does something like put a gun to another person’s head — although by then the victim may be dead.
It is therefore time for the mayoral candidates to stop telling us what they’re against and start telling us what they’re for.
Will they return to reactive policing — where officers in radio cars try to spot crimes in progress and respond to 911 calls? All research on police effectiveness has found that cruising cars rarely see crimes being committed, while most radio calls leave cops arriving at the scene too late to apprehend the perps.
That, after all, is why the NYPD adopted proactive policing in the first place — to head off criminals before they could assault or rob someone. This is the approach that, since 1990, has brought murders in New York City down from well over 2,000 a year to well below 400, and robberies from over 100,000 to 20,000.
A much touted crime-fighting approach is community policing. But while mobilizing citizens is good, it’s a tricky business. For example, it can mean such things as establishing civilian patrols — a worrisome concept in light of the Trayvon Martin case.
Of course, we’ll be assured that the patrol will only be “the eyes and ears of the police.” But what if a patrol member observes a man pulling a young girl into a car: Will he stand by and wait for the police to get there, or will he intervene — only to find he has slugged the girl’s father?
Chicago practiced community policing for years; it didn’t prevent murders from skyrocketing last year. And while the Windy City is back to “normal” this year, that means a murder rate over three times greater than New York’s.
New York City also tried community policing in the early 1970s and again in the early 1990s; both experiments flopped.
In the mid ’90s, Boston undertook an ambitious program to reduce juvenile murders and to buy back guns to get them off the street. Early results were promising; police officials and academics proclaimed it “the Boston miracle.”
A few years later, though, with youth killings zooming up and the streets saturated with the latest model guns (some of them bought with money from buybacks), the police and civilians who’d designed the programs stopped high-fiving each other and started quarreling in public.
If the mayoral candidates actually offer proposals for how they’ll replace proactive policing, ask them for some evidence that their ideas will work as well as our own “New York miracle” has done these last 20-plus years.
Crime probably won’t soar immediately in 2014. When criminals see cops abandoning proactive tactics, they’ll likely suspect that it is a sting to bring them into the open so they can be rounded up.
After a while, though, the gunmen will catch on. They’ll realize that large sections of the city have been conceded to predators, and crime will rise. In a few years, we will likely reach a tipping point where violence spirals completely out of control.
Then we’ll be back to the late 1980s, when many neighborhoods were free-fire zones and children slept in bathtubs to avoid stray bullets that came through windows.
Thomas A. Reppetto is the former president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City and author of “American Police, 1945-2012.”